Please enjoy each fact equally.
Spoilers below for the seventh episode of “Severance” Season 2, “Chikhai Bardo.”
In the seventh episode of “Severance” Season 2, the show answers some big questions about what’s happening with Gemma / Ms. Casey (Dichen Lachman), Mark Scout’s (Adam Scott) supposedly “dead” wife who lives at his sinister company, Lumon.
In an interview with The Post, Emmy-nominated “Severance” production designer Jeremy Hindle talked about the newly revealed testing floor space where Gemma has been trapped as scientist conduct tests on her.
“There’s another layer, another floor below [it]. Honestly, I don’t know how many [floors] there are, until we keep going. But, that’s its own floor that has its own access,” he said.
The AppleTV+ sci fi thriller, which stars Adam Scott, Patricia Arquette, Britt Lower and John Turturro — follows “severed” employees at the sinister cult-like biotech company, Lumon. They have a chip in their head that severs their work self from their greater identity. Outside of the office, they have no memory of what they did at work all day, and vice versa.
Mark opted to get “severed” because he couldn’t deal with the grief of losing his wife, Gemma, supposedly in a car accident. Season 1 revealed that Gemma was alive as the Lumon wellness counselor Ms. Casey, and in that identity, she had no memory of being married to Mark. In Season 2, Mark has tried to search for her as she’s gone missing.
But “Chikhai Bardo” reveals that Lumon was pulling the strings all along. They sent Gemma mysterious mailings before they ostensibly took her to live on their “testing” floor, and allowed Mark to believe that his wife was dead.
The space where Gemma stays has numerous doors where scientists lead her into various rooms – including one labeled “Cold Harbor,” the project Mark has been working on.
Hindle, who also worked on “Top Gun: Maverick,” told The Post, “We really follow a general story [with Gemma], but there are possibly other people [down there]. In her little circle, as you can see, there’s four doors.”
But, he said that not all of the show’s mysteries have been revealed to him yet: “What else do the [the doors] do? I don’t know.”
When he was designing the testing floor, it was different from his design of the Severed floor that Mark and his colleagues work on.
“The ceilings are higher, everything’s a little different,” he said.
“It’s more medical, it’s more clinical. It’s sterile, I think, because ultimately it’s more of a medical floor. So it has a bit of a medical feel to it.”
Each door is also “on an angle” so that nobody can “just walk straight into a room,” he explained, because they might remember it. These angles allow Gemma to stay disoriented.
“The design was based on the rules of what’s happening on that floor,” he explained.
“And then there’s also like 25 rooms per person to test. So there’s 100 rooms. So the floor is massive, in theory….it just goes on forever.”
